What's up dear friends,
I've been running Slack for a long period of time, and totally avoided the use of Wintendo all that time. Now, I've noticed I'm running out of space on my /home partition and, since I would like to reformat everything, I'd like to change my filesystem to ReiserFS, all of that without losing any of my files, configs etc.
I thought I could tar or gzip whole the root folder with the /home partition, put those huge files on another HDD and then resize, reformat etc. and after that star Slax or any other Live distro and mount the new partitions, untar/unzip the huge created files and change /etc/fstab and reinstall LiLo.
Is that possible? Is there any other way to resize and change filesystem type without losing files? (Except staring Wintendo and using PM, thats obvious)
Thanks in advance,
-thugic

The way you are talking about is perfectly fine. You can use bzip2 if you need big-time compression but it's very slow. If you have two drives mounted at once you could tar directly to the backup drive, if this is what you are saying.

I did this recently and it worked great. It's less risk than resizing the filesystems. Backup/restore is the 100% sure thing.

Or if you have that backup drive in the box, or on the network, you can use rsync.

I was thinking of doing the exact thing. I have 2 80Gb HDD's on the first i have /dev/hda1 - ext2 mounted on /mnt/hda1 (old Windows C partition) , /dev/hda2 - ext3 mounted on /mnt/hda2 (old Windows D partition) , /dev/hda5 - ReiserFS mounted on / (currently Slackware / partition) and /dev/hda6 - swap and the other drive I have only /dev/hdc1 - ext3 mounted on /mnt/hdc1 (backup disk). I am a newbie in linux unlike "thugic" so if someone would take the time to explain a bit more clearly to me with commands, etc. I would be more than greatfull. The thing is I want to have only 1 partition on /dev/hda with Slackware on it and ReiserFS and keep the system I have(configurations, updates, EVERYTHING), so is there any way or program that can change /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 file system to ReiserFS and merge /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2 and /dev/hda5 all toghether to just a partiton /dev/hda1 (smth like Partion Magic is on Windows) and then I just modify /etc/fstab and run liloconfig again ? Or if nothing like this exists how should I backup all my system on /dev/hdc1, delete all the partitions, merge them, change fstype to ReiserFS and then put my system back ?! I'm sorry if I haven't been to clear, did my best to write correctly and usefull info. If anything unclear I'm willing to give any information. Thanks.

Dude, the first thing is to clean up your post so we can read it! Then we will try to help